I continue to experiment with poetry -- and, to my delight, I keep finding some success with it.
I'll be honest: I am not sure the tipping point between someone who is having fun experimenting with poetry and an actual poet, but given the amount of good poetry news I've had in the last year or so, I... Continue Reading →
I wanted to share with you a project I have been working on and published over at Substack. It's called "For Immediate Release: Essays and Lessons From 30 Years in Politics and Government."
I hope you'll visit Half and One, "a space for cartoons and comics, journalism and narrative non-fiction, poetry and fiction." There, you will find some amazing stories and original work. You will also find my poem, Alight. It is accompanied... Continue Reading →
“Well,” said Erwin, finally sitting up and taking the last sip of his honey wine. “We cannot do it alone. The job requires a third. And a third of some abundance of skill, and no small amount of magical power. We are both thinking the same thing, of this I am sure. So let me be the first to give it voice.”
I had nearly forgotten about the picture, had come so terribly close to letting it slip away from my memory forever. Weeks would go by before the amber-red flames would dance and roil in my mind’s eye once again.
One of the marketing tools used by publishers to promote books are book trailers. It's almost exactly what you think it is -- like a movie trailer, a minute or two, with maybe a voice-over, some graphics. I watched a few and decided that I'd like to make my own for Canebrake.
On Friday and then again on Saturday evening, I drove south to the Sarasota Contemporary Dance studio for the first installment of what turned out to be a fantastic collaboration. My friend and world-class cellist Natalie Helm came up with the idea: Bach Immersion Concerts, a one-of-a-kind exploration of Johann Sebastian Bach's Six Suites for Solo Cello. The idea is to present "a multi-sensory interactive live performance," and that's exactly what happened.
Read it when the anthology is published, and more important, read the work of the winners and support literary journals and magazines whenever you can.
benjamin j kirby 